Thackeray's Barry Lyndon

[The following passage comes from the Project Gutenberg online edition of Trollope's Thackeray prepared by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Lisa Reigel, and the Project Gutenberg proofreading team.
The decorated initial 'I' is based the one on a Thackeray designed for Vanity Fair. — George P. Landow]

n imagination, language, construction, and general literary capacity,
Thackeray never did anything more remarkable than Barry Lyndon. I have
quoted the words which he put into the mouth of Ikey Solomon, declaring
that in the story which he has there told he has created nothing but
disgust for the wicked characters he has produced, and that he has "used
his humble endeavours to cause the public also to hate them." Here, in
Barry Lyndon, he has, probably unconsciously, acted in direct
opposition to his own principles: Barry Lyndon is as great a scoundrel
as the mind of man ever conceived. He is one who might have taken as his
motto Satan's words; "Evil, be thou my good." And yet his story is so
written that it is almost impossible not to entertain something of a
friendly feeling for him. He tells his own adventures as a card-sharper,
bully, and liar; as a heartless wretch, who had neither love nor
gratitude in his composition; who had no sense even of loyalty; who
regarded gambling as the highest occupation to which a man could devote
himself, and fraud as always justified by success; a man possessed by
all meannesses except cowardice. And the reader is so carried away by
his frankness and energy as almost to rejoice when he succeeds, and to
grieve with him when he is brought to the ground. [70-71]

. . . . .

The rascal, of course, comes to a miserable end, but the tone of the
narrative is continued throughout. He is brought to live at last with
his old mother in the Fleet prison, on a wretched annuity of fifty
pounds per annum, which she has saved out of the general wreck, and
there he dies of delirium tremens. For an assumed tone of continued
irony, maintained through the long memoir of a life, never becoming
tedious, never unnatural, astounding us rather by its naturalness, I
know nothing equal to Barry Lyndon.

As one reads, one sometimes is struck by a conviction that this or the
other writer has thoroughly liked the work on which he is engaged. There
is a gusto about his passages, a liveliness in the language, a spring in
the motion of the words, an eagerness of description, a lilt, if I may
so call it, in the progress of the narrative, which makes the reader
feel that the author has himself greatly enjoyed what he has written. He
has evidently gone on with his work without any sense of weariness, or
doubt; and the words have come readily to him. So it has been with
Barry Lyndon. "My mind was filled full with those blackguards,"
Thackeray once said to a friend. It is easy enough to see that it was
so. In the passage which I have above quoted, his mind was running over
with the idea that a rascal might be so far gone in rascality as to be
in love with his own trade. [75-76]